Space Visitor

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, abbreviated as NASA and also known as the U.S. Space Agency, was an administrative scientific research agency of the United States federal government. It was responsible for formulating and carrying out the United States' space programs, as well as conducting research in aeronautics and space science.

Its most famous and widely known undertaking was the Apollo Moon Landing Program.

But on August 11, 2013, the ninety-two-meter-tall, 2,700-ton monster Axehead passed through a wormhole and first appeared near San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Three cities were destroyed. At first, the United States military and the Royal Air Force bombed Axehead relentlessly for a week without effect. In the end, they had no choice but to deploy three nuclear bombs to destroy Axehead.

Axehead's blood contamination directly turned Oakland into a dead city.

Everyone thought it was merely a sudden incident involving a mutated creature like Godzilla. Yet only six months later, a second monster attacked Manila, making everyone realize that the monsters' appearances were not isolated incidents.

Scientists later determined that the first wave of monster attacks had been suicidal acts of "fire on me." Humanity's conventional weapons had no effect on them. Nuclear bombs could destroy them, but would also trigger the massive release of toxins from their bodies.

It was a form of "natural selection," changing Earth's atmosphere, soil, and water sources through suicide, exterminating life on Earth.

In other words, although nuclear bombs could kill a certain number of giant beasts, humanity would die out before the giant beasts did.

Thus, the joint defense system formed by twenty-one countries, including the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Chile, Canada, Australia, and South Korea—the Pacific Rim Joint Defense Force—was established. Its purpose was to build giant mechs capable of matching the monsters and use purely physical attacks to cause them to die from "internal bleeding," preventing their toxins from polluting the atmosphere.

With survival at stake, vast amounts of funding were redirected to the Pacific Rim Joint Defense Force to build Jaeger mechs and fight the monsters.

As a result, the once-thriving National Aeronautics and Space Administration was left with only enough funding to maintain the status quo. It no longer had the money to launch any space-related programs.

NASA had more or less become a place for monitoring Earth's "safety."

That day, an alarm suddenly rang out inside NASA, and red warning lights flashed without stop.

Robert, who had just made himself a cup of coffee, jolted in fright. The steaming coffee spilled onto his hand, scalding him badly enough to make his face twitch. He sucked in a breath through clenched teeth and steadied his arm, set down the coffee, then pulled a black patterned handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it against the burn as he walked into the satellite monitoring hall lined with screens.

"What happened?" Robert asked Gale, the director of satellite surveillance, his gaze fixed directly on the giant screen, where flames from atmospheric friction completely enveloped a "meteor" plunging toward the ground.

"Director, a reconnaissance satellite detected a 'meteor' that suddenly appeared in the stratosphere, roughly forty-five kilometers above the ground," Gale, the director of satellite surveillance, answered from beside him.

"It suddenly appeared?"

Robert frowned in confusion. It suddenly appeared?

How could it suddenly appear? The United States had nearly three thousand artificial satellites operating in Earth's orbit, monitoring almost the entire globe. If a meteor appeared hundreds of thousands of kilometers out in space, posed a threat to Earth, and was heading toward it, it would be detected by satellite. Its trajectory would be calculated, and whether to destroy it with missiles would depend on factors such as its size, projected impact site, and level of danger.

So it was practically impossible for a "meteor" to suddenly appear in the stratosphere without being detected by satellite.

"How is this possible?" Gale, who was examining the surveillance satellite records nearby, clutched his temples with both hands, ran them through his thinning flaxen hair, and stared wide-eyed in disbelief.

"My God."

"Am I seeing things?"

"Damn it, I don't think you are."

"We might be looking at God."

"How is this possible? Impossible."

"God..."

Many of the staff operating the equipment looked at the surveillance satellite footage Gale had pulled up. At first glance, they saw He-El appear in the stratosphere. Though the image was unclear, they could still make out a humanoid figure.

One staff member found it hard to believe and said loudly, "Maybe it's just a meteor that happens to be shaped like a person. That isn't unusual."

But he was quickly refuted.

"This thing has a nose and eyes." Although the image was not very clear, they could still see that the "meteor" had a nose and eyes, intact limbs, and fair skin. It really did not look like a rock.

He was not a meteor.

NASA fell silent in an instant. A pin drop could be heard.

Director Robert stood frozen for quite some time, the humanoid figure from the footage replaying endlessly in his mind. No one could possibly understand how a person had gotten into the stratosphere, or how he had suddenly appeared there.

"Slow the footage down ten times. I need to know how he appeared," Robert shouted after blanking out in shock for a moment and hastily coming back to his senses.

Gale immediately operated the controls and slowed the footage down tenfold.

On the screen, He-El suddenly appeared, then was pulled by Earth's gravity and fell like a meteor.

"Fifty times!" Robert shouted again.

The footage slowed once more, but it still only showed He-El suddenly appearing without any warning.

"Take it to the maximum, Gale! I want the frame from the instant before he appeared!" Robert shouted. This scene that defied common sense filled him with inner terror and made him nearly hysterical.

Gale operated the controls swiftly.

This time, it was as though the image had frozen. Heaven and Earth stood still. Then, a vortex suddenly appeared. He-El emerged, and the vortex vanished. It happened so fast that even at the slowest speed, they could only see the vortex disappear in an instant.

"It's a wormhole!"

"A visitor from space?"

"My God."

"Impossible! Impossible!"

"A human body passing through a wormhole?"

NASA erupted in uproar. Everyone had seen that unmistakable vortex wormhole. Though it lasted only a brief instant, it had appeared solely to send one person through.

What they had witnessed was challenging the minds of everyone present.

Everyone who could work at NASA was a carefully selected intellectual. They understood the significance of opening a wormhole, something Earth was utterly incapable of doing.

A human body passing through a wormhole, this...

How was that possible?!

A human body passing through a wormhole?

Had they witnessed the arrival of a visitor from beyond Earth, or perhaps God?

"Director, the 'meteor' has accelerated to Mach 2. It has not weakened in the slightest or lost any mass, and it's falling toward the Pacific Rim Joint Defense Force base in Anchorage, Alaska."

An operator calculated the "meteor's" impact location and reported it.

"Notify the general at the Anchorage, Alaska base and tell him to prepare."

"Contact the president."

Though still shaken and his thoughts in turmoil, Robert continued issuing the correct orders. His eyes were full of disbelief, wide as he stared intently at the meteor falling on the screen.

"Impossible. It has already accelerated to a falling speed of Mach 2."

"How could a human body withstand friction at that speed?"

"Above Mach 1, human flesh would separate from the bones, and the heat from friction would burn the bones into ash."

"At Mach 2, he should have already been completely burned away by friction in midair."

"This defies all reason."

"Unless he has a body of steel."